As described in copending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 285,891, filed Dec. 16, 1988, whose contents are hereby incorporated by reference, the United States currently has the world's largest postal system. The U.S. Post Offices currently handle in excess of 100 billion pieces of mail per year, about half the total volume handled throughout the world. The servicing of mail delivery involves three essential steps; collection, sorting and delivery. Collection takes place through a series of post offices spread throughout the United States. The United States has about 30,000 post offices that provide mail services in addition to 9,000 smaller postal center which provide some kind of some type of mail service. Postal employees typically take letters and packages from mail box facilities to the nearest local office where it is accumulated for the sorting procedure.
At the post office, postal clerks remove collected mail from sacks, bundle packages and segregate mail by size and class into separate categories. The mail travels by truck from local post offices to a central facility known as a sectional center. The United States has 264 sectional centers, some of which serve hundreds of local post offices. The sectional center processes nearly all the mail coming or going from its region. At the sectional center, high speed automated equipment sorts large volumes of mail. The postal service currently uses two sorting systems. One system is devoted to letters and other first class mail, and the other system, for bulk mailing, is used to sort packages, magazines advertising, circulars and other large mail. The letter sorter process involves manually moving mail sacks onto moving conveyor belts, which carry the mail to a machine called an edger-feeder which sorts it according to envelope size.
The postal service regulates the size of envelopes to make such mechanical sorting easier. Moreover, the equipment available at the post office includes automatic optical character readers and bar code readers. Based on the information derived from this equipment, the incoming mail can be sorted, usually first by region, and later by individual zip code. In general, the U.S. Postal Service provides discounts on postage rates if the mailer preprocesses its mail to lighten the post office workload. Thus, discounts are available for pre-sorting the mail, or for using barcoding, or for using address printing with fonts that can be read by automated equipment, as well as in other ways to be described. As a result, there are many ways available for the mailer or user of the postal system to cut their costs, if they are fully cognizant of postal system regulations in force which are applicable to the mailer's activities.
In the commonly-assigned, referenced, copending application Ser. No. 285,891, the concept of work sharing, wherein a user provides certain processing activities prior to delivering the mail to the central postal facilities, has been proposed. This is a positive innovation in the field of mail processing which may have a substantial impact in the future implementation of mail services. However, placing a burden on the user to provide certain of the facilities and services which the U.S. Postal Service facilities now provide is an equally heavy burden for the user, and must be done in a manner which permits the user to realize substantial savings despite its own increased work load. The user must be able to take advantage of the reduced postal service rates without the resulting costs exceeding the benefit provided to the user by its work-sharing mail preprocessing installation.
The U.S. Postal Service has already recognized the ability of users to preprocess certain kinds of mail and will accept mail in bulk delivered from a processor along with certification that its procedures have been complied with, and will accept such certification as prima facia justification for reduction in postal service rates. Thus, for example, manifest systems, wherein a manifest is provided to the central post office representative of a group of documents preprocessed by the user, are already known and do allow the user to realize a substantial reduction in rate. However, a large number of additional services, aside from manifesting services, may also be provided by the user and accepted as such by the central processing facility of the postal service in exchange for rate reductions. These additional services, however, require interface communications between a data center and the user so as to maintain within the user's facility up-to-date information regarding internal postal procedures, such as rates, volume, quantity discounts and the like in order for the post office facility to accept as valid a certification by the user that certain procedures mandated by the Postal Service have been complied with.
Mail processing systems having work-sharing features are discussed not only in application Ser. No. 285,891, but also in commonly-assigned copending applications Ser. Nos. 234,977 filed Aug. 23, 1988, and in U.S. Pat. No. 4,713,761. These applications relate to the concept of using certain limited user-provided mailing services. The '761 patent relates to accounting and billing, and does not solve the problem of relieving the postal service of substantial service burdens in an effective manner. Prior art manifest or "passport" systems--see, for example, commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,837,701, while allowing some form of certification, are difficult to implement in small user situations due to lack of trained personnel.
In order to contribute to the profitable operation of a user's work-sharing preprocessing installation, mail processing will have to be automated, and will require data sharing through the use of telephone or other data communication links. Of course, the use of such communication interfaces for computer operations is well known. For instance, commonly-assigned U.S. Pat. No. 4,122,532 discloses a telecommunication system for updating postal rate information at remote locations. However, the implementation of preprocessing services that were previously provided by a post office requires a trained mailroom operator, and the problems encountered in maintaining a trained mailroom staff needed to enable users to take advantage of such services remain a serious limitation on the installations' profitability.